Chinese labour camp system under review

China will start overhauling its ­draconian system of re-education through labour in the coming year, signalling the incoming leadership’s determination to alter one of the government’s more widely despised cudgels for punishing petty criminals, religious dissidents, petitioners and other perceived social irritants.

A brief announcement by the official Xinhua news agency lacked details, but legal advocates said they were hopeful that the five-decade-old system for locking up offenders without trial would be significantly modified, if not abolished altogether.

“If true, this would be an important advance," said Zhang Qianfan, a law professor at Peking University, who has pushed for the system’s demise. “It’s a tool that is abused."

Established by Mao Zedong in the 1950s to swiftly neutralise political opponents, re-education through labour has evolved into a sprawling extralegal system of 350 camps where more than 100,000 people toil in prison factories and on farms for up to four years. Sentences are meted out by local public security officials, and defendants have no access to lawyers and little chance for appeal.

Since the 1980s, legal scholars and human rights advocates have wanted an end to the system and urged that the prosecution of minor offences be shifted to criminal courts. The ­campaign has been re-energised in recent months by several cases, widely promoted in the news media, in which people were consigned to the camps for criticising or annoying local party officials.

But any jubilation that the system might be on its way out was tempered by the manner in which the news emerged. Details of a conference held by top judicial and legal officials were reported online on Monday by a number of news media outlets – including word that the party would “stop using the system" within a year. Those accounts, however, were later deleted, leaving only the brief ­Xinhua account.

China’s incoming president Xi ­Jinping has promised to strengthen the nation’s legal system since his elevation to party secretary in November, and has reiterated his support for greater rule of law, saying the government should “improve empathy and public credibility of legal affairs work, striving to ensure that the public feels that justice is served in every law case."

Rights advocates are pleased that the issue is on the leadership’s agenda but said that the devil would be in the details. Previous proposals for change, they noted, have included an 18-month cap on sentences, weekend furloughs for prisoners and access to lawyers for defendants. But such modifications alone, they said, would leave intact the bones of a system that violates international legal conventions as well as Chinese law.

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“The risk is we’ll get re-education lite, a system that perpetuates the ability of police to deprive people of liberty without trial," said Nicholas Bequelin, a researcher at Human Rights Watch. “My fear is that such a system would end up being harder to do away with."